openVFR Norway?

[Guest]

All my life (so to speak ^_^ ) I've been looking for good Norwegian scenery. I do have the freeware Norway Scenic II scenery and the freeware airports but I am always looking for more realism. Today I stumbled upon openVFR and they seem to have Norway available too: afaik openVFR is similar to UTX (which I also own) but more detailed and precise... Can anynone confirm this for Norway?

 

I also noticed you can buy buildings and objects for Norway seperately...?!? Does that mean I will get stavkirkes and 'real' norwegian houses and so on...? There is no real explanation on the site and no special product page for Norway so I am left a little bit in the dark about all this...

 

http://openvfr.freyt.de/magento/

 

Seems they use some sort of OpenStreet information to place houses on the real world location? I wonder if the houses in the real location won't look odd on the generic textures where there might not be houses at that same location in those textures...?

 

It's all a bit vague and not too clear so I'd like to know more about it. I'd like to see some of those Norwegian objects and buildings: they offer the same things for a lot of other countries and I wonder if you don't simply get the same houseswhen you buy objects and buildings for another country...

[Guest]

Really no one who owns these products...? It's almost impossible to find reviews about it. Seems it isn't much good then, I suppose...

[Gason 6]

Hi Jeroen.

 

I did not know about their products so I took a quick look. Promising.

 

As a former heli pilot I know Sweden by heart. I intend to buy whatever is needed and compare with FSX and what I know from real life in the air.

I will install on another PC so I can compare side by side. Just now I´m short of time but will be back here as soon as I can.

 

Regards

Goran

[Guest]

Great! Looking forward to your review! ^_^

[simmerhead 885]

Never tried it since I have UTX, but I checked openstreetmap and they seem to have great coverage of Norway (looked at a few rural areas), so in theory it could be great.

 

As for the scenery it was so badly promoted on their website (tiny screenshots) and no reviews to be found, so I'm not gonna try it out.

[la-180 8]

Being as I live in Switzerland, I recently bought the Terrain, Objects and Buildings (3 separate purchases) for Switzerland. I no longer have UTX or GEX installed since this is a new computer and I thought I'd wait for ORBX global before going back down that road.

 

I found the OpenVFR Switzerland to be very frame rate friendly, no problems there. It looks very good from anything over 2-3000 ft, but to me it looks a little bit odd below that height. Having said that, I always start my flights from LSZR Altenrhein, and this area in the east of Switzerland seems to be a bit neglected in the Open Streets coverage, so for example the city of St. Gallen is not very nicely represented and the village of Heiden where I live has no buildings at all in it, just the road network. I expect this will however improve with patches once the Open Street data improves.I think it is certainly a product with great potential, and for me it fits the bill since I do most of my flying in ORBX areas anyway, so if I do venture outside then I can just buy the areas I need instead of a whole continental coverage. The OpenVFR products will apparently also work fine with FTX Global when it comes out, there are some screenshots on the ORBX forum.

 

Cheers

Jack

[stevem72 10]

Jeroen

 

There are some screenshots of the upcoming FTX Global using Openvfr on the FTX\ORBX website (in the Preview Screenshot subforum).

 

I know its probably not what you might be lookin for but there is also a "small" explanation of how Openvfr works....that might assist you in researching prior to buying or not.

 

Regards

 

Steve

 

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

[fre391 0]

Hi,

 

from my point of view openVFR Norway is one of the greatest scenery we ever produced. We launched it recently and it contains our latest knowledge about scenery design. I think esp. the new openVFR Buildings gives much more realism.... At the moment Norway is my favorit country to fly, indeed. Acutually I cant stop flying there . :-)

 

You can find some screens at our openVFR Facebook page:

 

So far

 

Markus

www.openVFR.de

[Gason 6]

Hello again.

 

Yesterday I downloaded Sweden terrain and objects from openVFR for a total of 13.98 Euros.

Just printed out "how to install" and intend to install them on a laptop this weekend with a clean FSX.

Exited as I have many places to compare with. Will start with terrain first for a check and then add objects

for a total result.

 

I'll be back.

 

Goran

[Guest]

I'll be back.

 

I'll be waiting! ^_^

 

I think esp. the new openVFR Buildings gives much more realism....

 

Hi Markus, welcome! About those buildings and objects: do those addons actually give me NEW (Norwegian) buildings or does it 'simply' put the default FSX autogen buildings at the right spots (using OSM data)?

[Gason 6]

Back again ^_^

 

Installed Sweden terrain, objects and buildings but they had no mesh file for Sweden at the moment but the following pics speaks for themself. I had to use my slight old lap-top with a clean FSX for this.

 

Inustrial aera def FSX, hard to see:

 

 

 

Industrial aera openVFR, there it is:

 

 

 

I have some more pics, but I have to shrink them a little before posting.

 

If I like openVFR? Yes, it gave me a better feeling of low flying even without a mesh change, hope one will be released.

Off to cut some more pics........

 

Goran

[Gason 6]

Back again with more findings. Okay It´s not Norway but.......some more pics:

 

 

On final to ESOW, def FSX, too many buildings on the island in the foreground.

 

 

 

 

Now openVFR, thats more like reality:

 

 

 

 

So, for me, I find openVFR useful for VFR flights, but not yet tested together with other add-on scenerys.

Suspect conflicts as you need to replace your original terrain.cfg with the one provided from openVFR.

 

Goran

[Guest]

Thanks for the screenshots. In some places the differences are obvious, in others not at all. I see the same autogen here and there! I think that for someone who knows the place openVFR is nice but for someone like me, who wants to get the 'feel' of the place right, it doesn't really make a difference: both look like default FSX to me. I see there are no real NEW buildings: they have just relocated them.

 

Thanks for the test! I think I'll pass (also because of that cfg replacement requirement).

[fre391 0]

Hi,

 

thanks for comparing the screens and also for your comparision to reality. That is also very interesting for us a we are located in Germany. So normally, we only have very limited information about the local situation. I'm glad to hear, that also openVFR Sweden and openVFR Norway is doing what it is build for: "Improoving the standard scenery of FSX to be much more realistic"

 

Well, actually we are also active flight simmers. The project openVFR was initiated some years ago while we were flying VFR in FSX. We were disappointed, when comparing the VFR charts with the terrain around us and we started to find a way to make the flying experience more realistic. We still have the vision is to add more and more countries of the whole world. Well, to be honest, even if we nearly have full Europe, some countries in North and most countries from South America, parts of Africa and first countries from Asia in place its still a very long way to go...

 

To answer your question:

 

"About those buildings and objects: do those addons actually give me NEW (Norwegian) buildings or does it 'simply' put the default FSX autogen buildings at the right spots (using OSM data)?"

 

For openVFR Buildings we place autogen buildings for better performance,. Also you could use the settings sliders in FSX to adjust it for less powerful computers. The difference to the "normal" autogen of FSX is, that we place each single building at their real location based on data from OSM. The buildings itself are standard autogen objects from FSX. We might change it someday to make the scenery even more interesting.

 

For openVFR Objects we have done that already. We deliver a set of predefined (non autogen) objects, which will be placed randomly, but also at real positions. So, if we need to place a power generator somewhere, the system will automatically take one from the internal pool and place it at its real position (which is also taken from Openstreetmap).

 

I hope, that this answers your question? Just let me know, if there is an open one left...

 

Thank you very much again...

 

Best regards

 

Markus

www.openVFR.de

 

Arg, another thing to mention. Don't worry about those changes in the terrain.cfg.

These changes are a general improovement of this file. I guess most suppliers doing nearly the same.

 

Its just to tell the flightsim to let the water flow OVER stones instead of flowing around. Reason is, that (if you have a bad mesh) it could happen that a river is broken.

Even the openVFR Mesh can not resolve this problem, because of the (standard) accuracy (SRTM) of the data taken from NASA.

 

You even could run openVFR WITHOUT those changes. You also could modify a few lines in this file manually. I think its well documented in our readme file. You just need a simply notpad for it. EASY!

We have had long discussion about creating an installer, but finally we don't want to create one. We (as flight simmers) would also like to have full control about what is happening

to our configuration files, esp. terrain.cfg. For some of us, its a long way to configure our systems, right? We hope this is fair enough?

 

Markus

www.openVFR.de